This year’s annual meeting of the
Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture was hosted
with panache by Philip Morgan at Johns Hopkins University. It was apt
that it took place in Baltimore, the birthplace of Ron Hoffman, whom the
conference honoured as he steps down from a long tenure presiding over
the institute. At the closing roundtable, a number of senior scholars
movingly—and in some cases hilariously—recounted their experiences as
Ron’s colleagues and friends, and paid tribute to his work as editor of
the Carroll papers and historian of the Revolutionary war and its
dissenters. Tongue firmly in cheek, Ron responded to the tribute
manfully, by quoting Charles Carroll’s response to a biography of
himself: what you have said, he told the biographer, makes me seem a
much greater man than I ever believed, yet you have said nothing that is
not absolutely true.

I can’t, of course, give a thorough
overview of the conference, because with simultaneous panels I could
only attend less than half of it; so I’ll stick to my personal
highlights, which of course begin with the opening plenary on Charles
Beard. Indeed, what was gratifying to me about the panel—apart from the
amazing opportunity to sit at the same table as Max Edling, Woody
Holton, Eric Slauter, and David Waldstreicher—was the seeming consensus
in the audience that Beard really is still worth talking about and
remembering fondly, in spite of all his failures (not least over
slavery). That we should be writing history that deals critically and
publicly with matters of class and power, which is precisely the point I
wanted to make, was left undisputed: leaving some of us to wonder,
perhaps all the conflict has generated something of a Beardian
consensus.